ASLA 2009 Professional Awards

Bustler: Best Landscape Architecture Projects Received ASLA 2009 Professional Awards

A Civic Vision and Action Plan for the Central Delaware, Philadelphia. Designed by Wallace Roberts & Todd, LLC, Philadelphia: The viaduct is transformed into a major regional open-space connector, with an extensive green network enhanced by acknowledging historic streams and creeks. The area becomes a major watershed feature, absorbing runoff and filtering stormwater through infiltration. (Photo: WRT / PennPraxis)

World Habitat Awards 2009

Bustler: WORLD HABITAT AWARDS 2009

Built to Last

Una bici que produce energía solar y eólica diseñada en Singapur

Por ALMUDENA MARTÍN

La bici permite no gastar energía contaminante en vehículos a motor, pero también podría servir para generar ella misma electricidad ‘limpia’, incluso parada. Ésta es una de las ideas que ha llevado a dos diseñadores de Singapur a dibujar sobre el papel una bici que produce energía solar y eólica. Este invento constituye el eje central de un sistema, bautizado como EHITS («Energy Harvesting Intermode Transport System»), que también cuenta con estaciones o portales de energía autónomos conectados a la red eléctrica y donde se aparcan las bicicletas.

Ben Lai y Cedrid Ng

«La bici tiene un panel solar acoplado al cuadro y cuenta con dos ruedas de rotor de disco sin maza (‘hubless wheel’) en las que van colocados dos generadores eólicos», explican los diseñadores Ben Lai y Cedrid Ng, «además el vehículo lleva una batería donde acumula la energía que después inyectará a la red eléctrica a través de un dispositivo de acople que hay cerca de los pedales y que sirve para conectarse a las estaciones de energía».

No se trata de una bicicleta eléctrica (aunque sí necesita una pequeña cantidad de energía para el funcionamiento de pequeños dispositivos, como son el identificador de seguridad por radiofrecuencia y el GPS adosado al manillar), sino más bien de pequeñas centrales eléctricas que funcionan tanto en movimiento como, sobre todo, cuando están paradas.

La cantidad de electricidad producida por cada una de ellas no es mucha. Pero este concepto resulta especialmente interesante ahora que proliferan los sistemas de préstamo público de bicicletas en muchas ciudades. Un ejemplo: el ‘Bicing’ de Barcelona prevé tener este año cerca de 6.000 bicis repartidas por toda la ciudad.

Ben y Cedrid, de 28 y 30 años respectivamente, tienen muy claro su proyecto: «todo el sistema está pensado para que cada portal de energía esté conectado a la red eléctrica general, aunque también existe la posibilidad de acoplar cada estación a una aplicación concreta, como por ejemplo, una farola, un panel electrónico, un anuncio electrónico de una parada de autobús o incluso puede servir como punto de recarga para un medio de transporte eléctrico».

Esto es posible gracias a que las estaciones están diseñadas por módulos, lo que también permite que se puedan aparcar juntas varias bicicletas. Lo cierto es que cada portal es en sí un generador de energía solar (ya que cuenta con placas solares), pero cuando le acoplamos la bicicleta, «se une una nueva fuente de generación de energía y la producción se duplica».

Cuando preguntamos a Ben y a Cedrid cómo les surgió la idea de diseñar algo así, nos aseguran que todo empezó cuando se dieron cuenta de cómo el uso de la bici como transporte interurbano iba en aumento en muchas ciudades: «el hecho de ver cómo cada vez más gente se sube a la bici para moverse por la ciudad, nos hizo pensar en que ahora era un buen momento para diseñar un vehículo que, además de ser sostenible, pudiera integrarse en la infraestructura urbana». Al mismo tiempo, añade Cedrid, «le dimos vueltas a cómo rediseñar el sistema de una ciudad para ganar eficiencia en términos de uso de energía».

A partir de estas reflexiones, los dos diseñadores se pusieron manos a la obra para conseguir un modelo de sistema energético basado en un transporte urbano e independiente, donde tanto los proveedores de energía, como los usuarios y el medio ambiente salieran beneficiados. «Tanto si la bici está rodando, como si está aparcada, el vehículo está generando una energía que después se inyecta en la red eléctrica de la ciudad. Por una parte, el medio ambiente sale ganando al tratarse de una fuente limpia que no emite CO2, y por otra, el ciudadano está siendo partícipe de un estilo de vida más sostenible», nos cuenta Ben.

Para sus creadores, este invento es todavía un diseño, pero «podría ser real y tener éxito en ciudades asiáticas —como China—, o en otras europeas —como Londres—, donde moverse en bici es muy habitual; aunque también hay que pensar en regiones costeras donde haya viento para aprovechar al máximo esta aplicación y Holanda sería un buen país donde comenzar». ¿Realidad o ficción? tú que opinas.

soitu.es

Learning From Slums

Today, one billion of the world’s people live in slums such as Dharavi, in Mumbai, India. (Scott Eells/Bloomberg News)

The world’s slums are overcrowded, unhealthy – and increasingly seen as resourceful communities that can offer lessons to modern cities.

By Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

NOT EVERYBODY LIKED «Slumdog Millionaire» as much as the Oscar committee did. Aside from slum dwellers offended by the title, some critics lambasted its portrait of life in Dharavi, the biggest slum in Mumbai, as exploitative. A Times of London columnist dubbed it «poverty porn» for inviting viewers to gawk at the squalor and violence of its setting.

But according to a less widely noticed perspective, the problem is not just voyeurism; it’s the limited conception of slums, in that movie and in the public mind. No one denies that slums – also known as shantytowns, squatter cities, and informal settlements – have serious problems. They are as a rule overcrowded, unhealthy, and emblems of profound inequality. But among architects, planners, and other thinkers, there is a growing realization that they also possess unique strengths, and may even hold lessons in successful urban development.

The appreciation can come from unlikely quarters: In a recent speech, Prince Charles of England, who founded an organization called the Foundation for the Built Environment, praised Dharavi (which he visited in 2003) for its «underlying, intuitive ‘grammar of design’ » and «the timeless quality and resilience of vernacular settlements.» He predicted that «in a few years’ time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living.»

He echoes development specialists and slum dwellers themselves in arguing that slums have assets along with their obvious shortcomings. Their humming economic activity and proximity to city centers represent big advantages over the subsistence farming that many slum dwellers have fled. Numerous observers have noted the enterprising spirit of these places, evident not only in their countless tiny businesses, but also in the constant upgrading and expansion of homes. Longstanding slum communities tend to be much more tightknit than many prosperous parts of the developed world, where neighbors hardly know one another. Indeed, slums embody many of the principles frequently invoked by urban planners: They are walkable, high-density, and mixed-use, meaning that housing and commerce mingle. Consider too that the buildings are often made of materials that would otherwise be piling up in landfills, and slums are by some measures exceptionally ecologically friendly. Some countries have begun trying to mitigate the problems with slums rather than eliminate the slums themselves. Cable cars are being installed as transit in a few Latin American shantytowns, and some municipal governments have struck arrangements with squatters to connect them with electricity and sanitation services.

And there are thinkers who take the idea a step further, arguing that slums should prompt the rest of us to reconsider our own cities. While the idea of emulating slums may seem absurd, a number of planners and environmentalists say that we would do well to incorporate their promising elements. One architect, Teddy Cruz, has taken the shantytowns of Tijuana as inspiration for his own designs; he is currently working on a development in Hudson, N.Y., that draws on their organically formed density.

«We should not dismiss them because they look ugly, they look messy,» says Cruz, a professor at UC San Diego. «They have sophisticated, participatory practices, a light way of occupying the land. Because people are trying to survive, creativity flourishes.» To be sure, there is something unseemly in privileged people rhapsodizing about such places.

Prince Charles, for all his praise, does not appear poised to move to a shack in Dharavi. Identifying the positive aspects of poverty risks glorifying it or rationalizing it. Moreover, some of the qualities extolled by analysts are direct results of deprivation. Low resource consumption may be good for the earth, but it is not the residents’ choice. Most proponents of this thinking agree that it’s crucial to address the conflict between improving standards of living and preserving the benefits of shantytowns.

But given the reality that poverty exists and seems unlikely to disappear soon, squatter cities can also be seen as a remarkably successful response to adversity – more successful, in fact, than the alternatives governments have tried to devise over the years. They also represent the future. An estimated 1 billion people now live in them, a number that is projected to double by 2030. The global urban population recently exceeded the rural for the first time, and the majority of that growth has occurred in slums. According to Stewart Brand, founder of the Long Now Foundation and author of the forthcoming book «Whole Earth Discipline,» which covers these issues, «It’s a clear-eyed, direct view we’re calling for – neither romanticizing squatter cities or regarding them as a pestilence. These things are more solution than problem.»

The word «slum» itself is controversial and slippery. In the United States, it is often used to refer simply to marginalized neighborhoods, but in developing countries, it usually means a settlement built in or near a city by the residents themselves, without official authorization or regulation. Housing is typically substandard, and the infrastructure and services range from nonexistent to improvised.

There is nearly as much diversity among informal settlements (a term sometimes used in preference to the more loaded «slum») as in their formal counterparts. They include a wide range of economic levels and precariousness. In Kenya, about a million people live in Kibera, outside the city center of Nairobi. Its huts are built of mud and corrugated metal, trash is everywhere underfoot, and «flying toilets» – plastic bags used for defecation and then tossed – substitute for a sanitation system. In Istanbul, by contrast, where the city government has been more sympathetic, some squatter areas have water piped into every home.

Without some degree of government support, slums tend to be fetid and disease ridden, and until a few decades ago, the most popular approach to solving their problems was to demolish them. In the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil, for example, razed many of its slums, called favelas, and relocated residents to government housing. But since then, a new idea has emerged in development circles: that such settlements are more than eyesores; they are the product of years of residents’ labor, and legitimate communities that should be improved rather than erased.

«One of the misconceptions is that they’re endless seas of mud huts,» says Robert Neuwirth, author of «Shadow Cities: a Billion Squatters, a New Urban World,» who spent two years living in squatter communities. «There’s a tremendous amount of economic activity – stores, bars, hairdressers, everything.»

An early reappraisal came in the book «Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process» (1972), edited by John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter. Some of the contributors had closely studied squatter communities in the developing world, and the book argued that when people had autonomy over their housing and their environments, the residents and the settlements thrived. The development community began to recognize the drawbacks of evicting people and relocating them, which can be «incredibly traumatic,» says Diana Mitlin, senior research associate at the International Institute for Environment and Development in the UK. In 1975, the World Bank officially changed its position to endorse upgrading instead of new site development for squatters.

More recently, shantytowns have been reassessed in light of the growing awareness of the benefits of urbanization. Cities provide myriad economic opportunities that are lacking in the countryside, which is why millions of people stream in every month. They also offer freedom – especially, notes Brand, for women, who find greater access to jobs and education, as well as healthcare. Birthrates tend to fall when families move from villages to cities, not only thanks to family planning services, but also because more children, an asset on the farm, are a burden in the city.

What’s more, cities are increasingly seen as good for the planet. Aside from slowing population growth, they’re also more efficient in their use of resources, and allow abandoned land in the country to regenerate.

Most of these benefits, of course, would accrue even if migrants were moving to apartments in fashionable districts. But in practice, urbanization means the movement of poor people into slums. And while this reality certainly poses challenges, in the past few years, some analysts have begun to see slums as not simply the only realistic option, but as having certain advantages over formal settlements, especially the government-built high-rise projects where the poor are often housed.

Shantytowns are «pedestrian-friendly. There are small alleyways, the streets are narrow. Children can play in the streets,» says Christian Werthmann, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard. Some frustrating parts of slum life – the close quarters and the need to cooperate with neighbors in endeavors like obtaining services – have an upside: they can contribute to a strong sense of community. And although many shantytowns are dangerous, some actually have very low crime rates. Writing recently in the New York Times, two researchers affiliated with the Indian nonprofit Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research defended the highly developed slum of Dharavi as «perhaps safer than most American cities,» protected by the watchful eyes of close-knit neighbors.

There is an ethos of self-reliance in communities independently built and continually rebuilt by their residents. Over the course of years or decades, residents may upgrade from cardboard to corrugated metal to brick, add floors on top of the roof. They are invested in their creations, and typically prefer them to the feasible alternatives. «When people are relocated to places where government thinks they can be housed in a better way, they often move back,» says Hank Dittmar, chief executive of Prince Charles’s Foundation for the Built Environment. Living in a legal neighborhood would usually mean more money for less space, without the prospect of improving or expanding. And it might entail constraints that don’t apply in the slums – for instance, zoning laws about where it’s acceptable to operate businesses.

Another major concern of contemporary urban planners is ecological sustainability, and shantytowns get high marks for that, too. Teddy Cruz, who has spent a great deal of time in Tijuana, says, «These slums have been made with the waste of San Diego. . . . Aluminum windows, garage doors. Debris is building these slums.»

Still, most shantytowns remain difficult and unhealthy places for people to live and grow up. They are also reviled by their wealthier neighbors, and as cities expand, sometimes they find themselves in the crosshairs of developers eager to build on their prime real estate. Some countries continue to clear slums: In 2005, Zimbabwe perpetrated brutal demolitions, called Operation Drive Out Trash, which left hundreds of thousands of settlers homeless. Dharavi is located in the heart of Mumbai, and plans have been underway to develop high-rises and high-end commercial ventures in that area. Following protests, the plans will now be reviewed by an advisory group that includes some residents.

In a number of countries, government and aid organizations have been working with squatters to retrofit slums. Brazilian favela dwellers, who are voters, have obtained concessions such as hookups to water mains and electricity. Squatters in many cities have established their own activist organizations, which work together under an umbrella group called Shack/Slum Dwellers International. Jockin Arputham, the group’s president (and head of India’s national slum-dweller organization) recalled in a published interview that years ago he led a large group of children in collecting garbage in their community and depositing it in front of the municipal council’s offices. «[W]e showed them the garbage problem in our settlement and began a negotiation,» he told the journal Environment & Urbanization. «We said that we would organize the garbage collection if the municipality would provide the truck to collect it regularly.» The gambit worked. There is debate about whether the informality itself is a plus or a minus. Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, has argued that slum dwellers should be given title deeds for their plots, in order to liberate the «dead capital» they are sitting on – to enable them to get loans from banks. But many analysts are skeptical of this proposal. One problem is that individual property rights could disrupt the stable system of communal control that has evolved in many slums. Another possibility is that residents might quickly sell their new deeds for cash, and thus lose the rights to their longtime homes.

There are also downsides to retrofitting slums. According to Ciro Biderman, a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, upgrading is much more expensive than building a new settlement with infrastructure in place from the outset, and amounts to a subsidy he considers unfair to poor people who do not live in slums. Another concern is that shantytowns are sometimes built on environmentally fragile terrain, such as steep hillsides or wetland areas – in those cases, helping residents stay in place can be both dangerous for the inhabitants and ecologically damaging.

Meanwhile, some observers in the developed world have been asking, what if the laudable aspects of these informal communities could be disentangled from the unfortunate parts? To build housing for low-income people, Cruz has drawn inspiration from Tijuana shantytowns for developments in Southern California, and is currently working on the one in Hudson. It will include communal porches and terraces, and spaces meant to encourage small start-up businesses – for example, providing room to store sewing machines. The intention is to integrate a poorer immigrant population into the area by creating openings for a community to evolve. He calls his vision «club sandwich urbanism – layering. It occurs through time. Our planning institutions never think about time.» Cruz and Neuwirth say we can also learn from the spirit of collaboration in informal settlements, and their ingenuity in the use of space. Their richness suggests to some that the dominant American mode of living, for all its suburban comforts, has come at a price. Municipalities might want to reconsider zoning laws to allow residences to double as businesses, says Cruz: he imagines small enterprises being run out of garages. In Werthmann’s view, we might also emulate the low-rise, high-density model, which is conducive to neighborliness and requires no elevators. On a more basic level, these places can teach us about where, for better or worse, urban life appears to be headed. «Squatters are the world’s dominant builders,» says Brand. «If you want to understand what’s going on in cities, look at squatters.»

Fuente: Boston Globe

Sergio Fajardo: A Conversation with Charlie Rose

Obama considera a latino para ocupar Oficina de Políticas Urbanas

Adolfo Carrión será nombrado por el presidente de Estados Unidos como gesto de acercamiento a la comunidad latina, según The Daily New

Adolfo Carrión, presidente del condado del Bronx, en el norte de la Ciudad de Nueva York, será nombrado director de la Oficina de Políticas Urbanas de Estados Unidos, de acuerdo con el periódico The Daily News. Aunque el nombramiento aún no es oficial, el canal de televisión local NY1 citó otras fuentes, tanto de la ciudad como de Washington, para sustentar la noticia. Carrión, quien ha sido señalado en varias ocasiones como posible miembro del gabinete del presidente Barack Obama, es dirigente de la Asociación Nacional de Funcionarios Latinos Electos, que agrupa a la mayoría de los políticos de origen latino del país. El posible nombramiento del funcionario -cuyos padres son de origen puertorriqueño-, es considerado como un gesto de acercamiento a la comunidad latina por parte de Obama. Hasta el momento, la oficina de Carrión no ha confirmado ni desmentido las versiones de prensa.

Fuente: El Universal.mx

The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!

Damien Hirst’s “Golden Calf” sold for $18.6 million last year, but the art climate has changed.

By HOLLAND COTTER

LAST year Artforum magazine, one of the country’s leading contemporary art monthlies, felt as fat as a phone book, with issues running to 500 pages, most of them gallery advertisements. The current issue has just over 200 pages. Many ads have disappeared.

The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing. Careers are leaking air. Chelsea rents are due. The boom that was is no more.

Anyone with memories of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing.

The diminishment has not, God knows, been quantitative. Never has there been so much product. Never has the American art world functioned so efficiently as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model.

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

Many of those specialists are, directly or indirectly, on the industry payroll, which is controlled by another set of personnel: the dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and — crucial in the era of art fairs — event planners who represent the industry’s marketing and sales division. They are the people who scan school rosters, pick off fresh talent, direct careers and, by some inscrutable calculus, determine what will sell for what.

Not that these departments are in any way separated; ethical firewalls are not this industry’s style. Despite the professionalization of the past decade, the art world still likes to think of itself as one big Love Boat. Night after night critics and collectors scarf down meals paid for by dealers promoting artists, or museums promoting shows, with everyone together at the table, schmoozing, stroking, prodding, weighing the vibes.

And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

The ideas don’t vary much. For a while we heard a lot about the radicalism of Beauty; lately about the subversive politics of aestheticized Ambiguity. Whatever, it is all market fodder. The trend reached some kind of nadir on the eve of the presidential election, when the New Museum trotted out, with triumphalist fanfare, an Elizabeth Peyton painting of Michelle Obama and added it to the artist’s retrospective. The promotional plug for the show was obvious. And the big political statement? That the art establishment voted Democratic.

Art in New York has not, of course, always been so anodyne an affair, and will not continue to be if a recession sweeps away such collectibles and clears space for other things. This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case it has been artists who have reshaped the game.

The first real contemporary boom was in the early 1960s, when art decisively stopped being a coterie interest and briefly became an adjunct to the entertainment industry. Cash was abundant. Pop was hot. And the White House was culture conscious enough to create the National Endowment for the Arts so Americans wouldn’t keeping looking, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., like “money-grubbing materialists.”

The boom was short. The Vietnam War and racism were ripping the country apart. The economy tanked. In the early ’70s New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, bleeding money and jobs. With virtually no commercial infrastructure for experimental art in place, artists had to create their own marginal, bootstrap model.

They moved, often illegally, into the derelict industrial area now called SoHo, and made art from what they found there. Trisha Brown choreographed dances for factory rooftops; Gordon Matta-Clark turned architecture into sculpture by slicing out pieces of walls. Everyone treated the city as a found object.

An artist named Jeffrey Lew turned the ground floor of his building at 112 Greene Street into a first-come-first-served studio and exhibition space. People came, working with scrap metal, cast-off wood and cloth, industrial paint, rope, string, dirt, lights, mirrors, video. New genres — installation, performance — were invented. Most of the work was made on site and ephemeral: there one day, gone the next.

White Columns, as 112 Greene Street came to called, became a prototype for a crop of nonprofit alternative spaces that sprang up across the country. Recessions are murder on such spaces, but White Columns is still alive and settled in Chelsea with an exhibition, through the end of the month, documenting, among other things, its 112 Greene Street years.

The ’70s economy, though stagnant, stabilized, and SoHo real estate prices rose. A younger generation of artists couldn’t afford to live there and landed on the Lower East Side and in South Bronx tenements. Again the energy was collective, but the mix was different: young art-school graduates (the country’s first major wave ), street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fab Five Freddy Braithwaite, assorted punk-rebel types like Richard Hell and plain rebels like David Wojnarowicz.

Here too the aesthetic was improvisatory. Everybody did everything — painting, writing, performing, filming, photocopying zines, playing in bands — and new forms arrived, including hip-hop, graffiti, No Wave cinema, appropriation art and the first definable body of “out” queer art. So did unusual ways of exhibiting work: in cars, in bathrooms, in subways.

The best art was subversive, but in very un-’60s, nonideological ways. When, at midnight, you heard Klaus Nomi, with his bee-stung black lips and robot hair, channeling Maria Callas at the Mudd Club, you knew you were in the presence of a genius deviant whose very life was a political act.

But again the moment was brief. The Reagan economy was creating vast supplies of expendable wealth, and the East Village became a brand name. Suddenly galleries were filled with expensive, tasty little paintings and objects similar in variety and finesse to those in Chelsea now. They sold. Limousines lined up outside storefront galleries. Careers soared. But the originating spark was long gone.

After Black Monday in October 1987 the art was gone too, and with the market in disarray and gatekeepers confused, entrenched barriers came down. Black, Latino and Asian-American artists finally took center stage and fundamentally redefined American art. Gay and lesbian artists, bonded by the AIDS crisis and the culture wars, inspired by feminism, commanded visibility with sophisticated updates on protest art.

And thanks to multiculturalism and to the global reach of the digital revolution, the American art world in the ’90s was in touch with developments in Africa, Asia and South America. For the first time contemporary art was acknowledged to be not just a Euro-American but an international phenomenon and, as it soon turned out, a readily marketable one.

Which brings us to the present decade, held aloft on a wealth-at-the-top balloon, threatening to end in a drawn-out collapse. Students who entered art school a few years ago will probably have to emerge with drastically altered expectations. They will have to consider themselves lucky to get career breaks now taken for granted: the out-of-the-gate solo show, the early sales, the possibility of being able to live on the their art.

It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again.

Art schools can change too. The present goal of studio programs (and of ever more specialized art history programs) seems to be to narrow talent to a sharp point that can push its way aggressively into the competitive arena. But with markets uncertain, possibly nonexistent, why not relax this mode, open up education?

Why not make studio training an interdisciplinary experience, crossing over into sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, poetry and theology?

Why not build into your graduate program a work-study semester that takes students out of the art world entirely and places them in hospitals, schools and prisons, sometimes in-extremis environments, i.e. real life? My guess is that if you did, American art would look very different than it does today.

Such changes would require new ways of thinking and writing about art, so critics will need to go back to school, miss a few parties and hit the books and the Internet. Debate about a “crisis in criticism” gets batted around the art world periodically, suggesting nostalgia for old-style traffic-cop tastemakers like Clement Greenberg who invented movements and managed careers. But if there is a crisis, it is not a crisis of power; it’s a crisis of knowledge. Simply put, we don’t know enough, about the past or about any cultures other than our own.

A globally minded learning curve that started to grow in the 1980s and ’90s seems to have withered away once multiculturalism fell out of fashion. Some New York critics, with a sigh of relief one sensed, have gone back to following every twitch of the cozy local scene, which also happens to constitute their social life.

The subject is not without interest, but it’s small. In the 21st century New York is just one more art town among many, and no longer a particularly influential one. Contemporary art belongs to the world. And names of artists only half-familiar to us — Uzo Egonu, Bhupen Khakhar, Iba Ndiaye, Montien Boonma, Amrita Sher-Gil, Graciela Carnevale, Madiha Omar, Shakir Hassan Al Said — have as much chance of being important to history as many we know.

But there will be many, many changes for art and artists in the years ahead. Trying to predict them is like trying to forecast the economy. You can only ask questions. The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture. What will artists do with this?

Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?

I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.

Right. Exactly. Crazy.

Fuente: NYT

Brasilia dice No a Niemeyer

Asociaciones patrimoniales se oponen a la construcción de una nueva plaza, junto a la Plaza de los Tres Poderes, el Congreso Nacional y la Catedral Metropolitana, edificios declarados patrimonio de la humanidad, también de su autoría

BRASILIA (AP).- El renombrado arquitecto brasileño Oscar Niemeyer desató una polémica con una propuesta para construir una nueva plaza en el centro de Brasilia, la ciudad que exhibe algunas de sus creaciones más celebradas.
Su idea de construir una Plaza de la Soberanía en la Explanada de los Ministerios, con un edificio curvo de baja altura y un obelisco inclinado de 100 metros, provocó una discusión en blogs, sitios de internet y medios de comunicación.
El debate se centra principalmente en la conveniencia de la obra en medio de edificios del propio Niemeyer, declarados patrimonio de la humanidad.
Incluso el Instituto de Patrimonio Histórico y Artístico (Iphan) y la Unesco terciaron en las discusiones para advertir que la plaza sería ilegal por contravenir la ley de patrimonio histórico de Brasilia, que establece que la Explanada de los Ministerios debe mantenerse abierta, sin ninguna construcción.
Defensores de la obra señalan que la nueva plaza aportaría a la ciudad un punto de encuentro para sus habitantes, mientras sus detractores alertan que sería un atentado contra el trazado original, obra del fallecido arquitecto Lucio Costa, e interferiría con la vista abierta de otras obras del propio Niemeyer.
El gobernador del Distrito Federal, José Roberto Arruda, presentó el proyecto a inicios de enero con la promesa de construirla a tiempo para las celebraciones del 50 aniversario de Brasilia, en abril de 2010. Pero ante los cuestionamientos surgidos en torno al proyecto, dio marcha atrás y dijo que no había presupuesto para la obra.
A sus 101 años de edad y aún activo, Niemeyer defendió su obra en una carta publicada por el diario Correio Braziliense .
«Me espanta la discusión levantada al presentar una nueva plaza para ser construida en Brasilia. En mi última visita (en diciembre) pude sentir con claridad la necesidad de crear una plaza en escala compatible con la capital de un país tan admirado como el nuestro», escribió el arquitecto en su carta.
Pero el superintendente del Iphan en el Distrito Federal, Alfredo Gastal, señaló que la ley de patrimonio histórico impide construcciones en el área central de la Explanada de los Ministerios. Argumentó además que, desde el punto de vista estético, bloquearía la vista abierta a otras obras del propio Niemeyer, como la Plaza de los Tres Poderes, el Congreso Nacional y la Catedral Metropolitana.
En medio de la polémica, la arquitecta María Elisa Costa, hija de Lucio Costa, propuso transferir la construcción a la parte posterior de la Estación Rodoviaria, principal centro de transporte urbano de la ciudad, donde no interferiría con otras obras de Niemeyer y mantendría fácil acceso para los visitantes de la terminal, como quería el arquitecto.
Entre tanto, el gobernador Arruda comentó el jueves que la discusión es sana en una ciudad joven como la capital brasileña. «Recibí el proyecto, agradezco a Oscar (Niemeyer) y agradezco a todas las personas que están dando contribuciones a Brasilia. Lo que encuentro bonito de esa polémica es que Brasilia está viva, está discutiendo».

Fuente: La Nación

El Sistema

José Antonio Abreu nació en Valera, Trujillo, Venezuela, el 7 de mayo de 1939. Posee un PhD en Economía Petrolera, y es compositor y organista.

Es considerado uno de los íconos culturales y musicales de Venezuela. Comenzó sus estudios musicales en Barquisimeto y luego continuó en Caracas, en donde recibió clases de Vicente Emilio Sojo, Moisés Moleiro y Evencio Castellanos. Tiene los títulos de Profesor Ejecutante, Maestro Compositor y Director Orquestal.

Fundó y dirigió la Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar (OSSB), así como también la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional Juvenil (1975) y la Fundación del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de Orquestas Infantiles y Juveniles (FESNOJIV), que es una red de orquestas infantiles, juveniles y coros que involucra cerca de 250 mil jóvenes músicos. Estos utilizan la educación musical para el desarrollo comunitario, la integración social y la solidaridad, que tiene como su máxima expresión la Orquesta Sinfónica de la Juventud Venezolana Simón Bolívar.

Este sistema ha sido modelo para otros países de Latinoamérica y el Caribe y ha sido merecedor de reconocimientos nacionales e internacionales, entre los cuales destaca el Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes 2008. Se rige por el principio de que «la música es un instrumento irremplazable para unir a las personas», por lo cual la actividad que realiza FESNOJIV forma parte del proyecto «Música para la acción social».

Durante la década de 1960 impartió la cátedra de Economía en distintas universidades. Luego, fue Diputado en el Congreso Nacional, y durante la década de 1970 se desempeñó en los cargos de Ministro de la Cultura, Vicepresidente y Director del Consejo Nacional de la Cultura (Conac).
Actualmente es miembro del Consejo Asesor de la Orquesta Juvenil de las Américas (co-fundado por el Conservatorio de New England) y director del Movimiento Nacional de Orquestas Venezolanas.

TED Prize winner José Abreu’s Wish:

“I wish you would help create and document a special training program for at least 50 gifted young musicians, passionate for their art and for social justice, and dedicated to developing El Sistema in the US and in other countries.”